Friday, November 7, 2014

EL GAVILAN: HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

As our national leadership squares off on the issue of illegal immigration and proposed "amnesty," a series of posts looking back at the themes and controversies informing my novel regarding illegal immigration and its toll on the heartland, El Gavilan. This one is from circa December 2011.

—————

My signature novels are historical literary thrillers. They feature
a 20th Century author and globetrotter named Hector Lassiter. The
Lassiter books span many decades and continents.

My novel El Gavilan,
is more contemporary and hits closer to home: it’s set, more or less, in a fictionalized version of Grove City, the central
Ohio town where I grew up.

In the 1990s, the Buckeye State began to undergo a sea
change triggered by tidal waves of illegal immigration.

The America southwest grabs all the national media attention
with its insanely over-the-top cartel violence, self-appointed “Minute Men”
roaming the desert with guns and calls for construction of Berlin-reminiscent,
soaring border walls.

Fact is, exploitation of illegal workers, human trafficking
and all the strife spinning out of the Mexican methamphetamine trade know no
boundaries.

As a county sheriff declares to El Gavilan’s presumptive hero, small town police chief Tell Lyon,
in a very real sense, “The border is now everywhere.”

As a central Ohio journalist, I saw communities changing as
native Ohioans and assimilation-resistant undocumented workers and their
families grudgingly struggled to strike some kind of live-and-let-live balance,
mostly unsuccessfully.

I experienced this nexus of intimations:

An illegal cockfighting ring was broken up a few miles from
my hometown.

In that same Westside enclave, a former blue-collar
neighborhood of GM factory workers, nearly all of the signage was suddenly of a
decidedly Spanish bent. The local library was scrambling to accommodate a
growing population of English-As-Second-Language patrons.

On the opposite side of a looming overpass, an apartment
complex became a target of arson. It proved to be a racially motivated
firebombing. Lives were lost in that fire…mostly those of children.

The fallout came in many dark flavors and it came down hard.The residents of the complex, recent immigrants to Columbus, had no English.
First-responders spoke no Spanish. The controversy spinning out of that case
drew national attention.

A few counties away, word came of a sheriff who chose to use
his slice of post-9-11, Homeland Security grants not to update radio equipment
or to obtain bomb-sniffing dogs as so many others were doing.

This lawman instead bought up billboard space and posted
warning messages directed at illegal immigrants. He sent bills to the federal
government demanding reimbursement of jail costs his department sustained
resulting from the feds’ failure to exercise adequate border enforcement.

All of these developments conspired to inspire El Gavilan. They also suggested the title character, conservative hardliner and Horton County Sheriff Able Hawk.

My notion was to take a damaged Border Patrol agent, a man
literally running from borderland grief and bloody cartel violence—a grieving
recent widower—and drop him into this maelstrom…and to confront him with Hawk.

Tell Lyon accepts the appointment to the position of small
town police chief expecting to have a kind of Mayberry-like ride. Tell arrives
in New Austin, Ohio, expecting to sort out nothing more serious than some drunk
and disorderly hi-jinks…family dramas and little traumas of shoplifting and
teens using fake I.D.s to try and buy cigarettes or the like.

It’s a miscalculation Tell comes to rue. He lands in town
just in time for the murder of a local Latino woman—a brutal crime that
triggers a firestorm of unexpected menace and threatens to trigger a race war.

It’s a cliché to say some novels read as if they were ripped
from the headlines.

Clichés become clichés, as journalist-turned-author Ian
Fleming once observed, because they’re typically so curiously valid.

In the case of El
Gavilan, the novel is indeed ripped from the headlines, but they were
headlines I sometimes wrote.

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THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH

The climax of the Hector Lassiter series, coming November 2016 from Betimes Books. "With THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH, Craig McDonald has crafted a remarkable coda to the series."—Steven Powell, author of JAMES ELLROY: DEMON DOG OF CRIME FICTION Get your copy here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N0D4UFX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edgar®/Anthony/Macavity/Gumshoe/Crimespree nominated novelist of ONE TRUE SENTENCE, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, TOROS & TORSOS, THE GREAT PRETENDER, ROLL THE CREDITS, THE RUNNING KIND, HEAD GAMES, PRINT THE LEGEND, DEATH IN THE FACE, THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH, EL GAVILAN, PARTS UNKNOWN, CARNIVAL NOIR, CABAL and ANGELS OF DARKNESS. Nonfiction titles include ART IN THE BLOOD and ROGUE MALES: CONVERSATIONS & CONFRONTATIONS ABOUT THE WRITING LIFE.

TOROS & TORSOS (HECTOR LASSITER SERIES #3)

THE GREAT PRETENDER (HECTOR LASSITER SERIES #4)

Hector Lassiter Series: #2 Bestseller, Amazon.com.au! "McDonald cagily splits up the action, with Welles in full enfant terrible mode in the first half of the book—much of the story unfolds on the night of the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938—while the second takes place in the late 1940s as the filmmaker's star is already burning out."—Vince Keenan, author of DOWN THE HATCH